Hannu Väisänen

2010

Book, 17.9 x 11 cm, 431 p, language: Finnish, publisher: Otava - Helsingissä Kustannusosakeyhtiö, Helsinki, ISBN: 9789511252.
Materials: ink, paper

Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. B 2030/178).

Literary synopsis

Smile fanatics and weepy feeling types, a blind painter named Doris and a duffle coat with an architect inside ... Kuperat ja koverat (Convex and Concave), the third book in this artist-writer’s autobiographical trilogy is a cornucopia. The Savonlinna High School of the Arts, with its ideological camps is just the opening bell on Antero’s path to independence and growth as an artist. Once he’s passed the entrance exams for art school, it’s time to take over Helsinki. His search for his niche as a student proves to be a multi-phased adventure, and along the way he gets to know such characters as an operetta singer who’s outgrowing her clothes and a seminarian who wears a wig. Antero’s emotional life is devastated when he falls in love with a duffle coat, and the architect inside it. Their alliance is like the siege of Orleans, short but far-reaching in its implications. The culmination of Antero’s colorful adventures comes when he is given his first solo exhibition, and at the opening has his final show-down with his father.

Relation of the novel to the artist’s practice

"In my paintings, I’m using more and more unmixed colors – that is, colors straight from the tube. It feels as if, after writing – which I always experience as black-and-white – I need to paint in pure primary colours. What a lot a large yellow surface can say! (…) The basic difference between writing about colours and painting with them is, I suppose, that in painting a colour refers only to itself, without references. Within sentences, a colour, however, is accurately described, appears like a symbol, within the framework of the agreements of language."

– Hannu Väisänen